phreak said:
Suggestion 6 -
Financing: Create a virtual donation box with an amount of money to be reached for a first release and ongoing support for the first year.

this is a little offtopic idea, but related .. wouldn't it be great if there was a platform where plugin ideas can be posted and thought through and for each project a money box (paypal) where people can put in some dollars (and the current amount of invested money is shown) until enough is reached for the developer to start working/release something

Thats a great idea. Ive also thought about a sort of stock exchange system where you could list a project, and sells shares of stock in the idea. Basically people who buy shares in the idea get to decide the requirements and direction. I think this idea could be pretty powerful if developed properly.

So the Achievements plugin for Buddypress gets it perfectly right, as far as I'm concerned, but I'm not sure if it's replicable for Vanilla.

Effectively what it does is look at event hooks (including ones exposed by other plugins) and let the administrator create Achievements for them. Achievements can be either Events or Awards. Event achievements let you select the event (examples like posting a comment, getting a 'like', posting a thread, etc etc etc), select a count threshold (1, 10, 100, whatever you like), edit the title and the hooray! text displayed for it, and add a point count for unlocking it. You can then upload and assign your own icon for the achievement.

Awards are just whatever you like, and can be given by the admin.

It's nearly infinitely extensible, because it's so easy to add new hooks into your themes and plugins. It also provides a nice set of template tags so you can add things like total achievement count and points and so on anywhere you like in your templates, as well as hooking in to user profiles to show latest and all achievement lists, and generating a page that shows Achievement lists sidewide, sortable by Count, Points, Most Recent and User. It also exposes a couple of plugins that can be thrown easily into any widgetable spaces.

It's a massive and very impressive plugin. Paul's a hell of a good coder and designer.